Blog

Are all mailboxes equal? Not when it comes to advertising mail, which seems to invoke three critical factors normally associated with real estate – location, location, location.

It costs the U.S. Postal Service less to deliver mail to curbside mailboxes or neighborhood cluster boxes than to your door. That’s why there’s been talk of possibly eliminating door-to-door delivery as Canada Post has recently announced. But the move could cut more than costs; it could also cut the effectiveness of ad mail, which provides about $16 billion of revenue annually to the Postal Service.

If you’ve rummaged around our website lately, you may have noticed a new tab on our home page entitled Audit Asks. “What is Audit Asks?” you might ask. It’s where you can read about some of our upcoming audits in their early stages and respond to questions that can help us develop more complete and useful audit reports.

Audit Asks is actually an update of our audit project pages, initially launched about 6 years ago to get feedback from our readers. With the new Audit Asks format, we have added some eye-catching graphics and changed our writing style to prompt more feedback.

In the sage words of Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will wind up somewhere else.” So, where does the U.S. Postal Service want to go? Well, by 2016 it hopes to end up a lot closer to solvency. And to get there, it developed the Delivering Results, Innovation, Value and Efficiency (DRIVE) management process.

The conventional wisdom on the future of print, if print has a future at all, is that old-fashioned books, magazines, and newspapers will still be around only as long as the generations that grew up with them are still around. But as older readers fade away, so will print because younger generations are all about digital communications. Or are they?

Reshaping a postal network doesn’t happen overnight. Especially one built to handle mainly letters and flats and not the tremendous anticipated growth in parcels. The Postal Service is attempting to tackle realignment in two phases, playing out over 4 years.

Latest Blog Posts

Nearly a decade since its rollout, the Flats Sequencing System (FSS) — the football-field sized sorting machines for flats mail — is still falling short of expectations. At its inception, stakeholders were optimistic FSS would improve productivity and reduce the U.S. Postal Service’s costs for...

What do Millennials like? That’s the 43 million hits question — as in Google hits. And that’s a pretty good indication of just how focused businesses are on this generation and its rising economic power.

The U.S. Postal Service is no different. It wants to understand how Millennials might...

Latest Audit Asks

The Management Operating Data System (MODS) provides data on workload, work hours, and machine-use. In addition to supporting operational planning, MODS data are used extensively in Postal Service costing and pricing activities. Supervisors may manually enter or adjust employee work hours and...

In December 2016, Congress passed the Federal Property Management Reform Act (FPMRA). The purpose of the FPMRA is to increase efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government, including the Postal Service, in managing its property by:

The U.S. Postal Service considers mail to be delayed when it is not processed in time to meet the established delivery day. Delayed mail can adversely affect Postal Service customers and harm the organization's brand.

Comments Wanted

We encourage you to visit our blog, which has a new topic for discussion every Monday. You can also give us your thoughts and opinions about upcoming audits on our Audit Asks page. Please refer to our comment policy for further information.